Australia's Dark Secret: The Inhumane Treatment of Indigenous Peoples

Living abroad and being a teacher, I often talk to people about the history of Australia. Many people find it hard to believe that in many ways Australia resembles South Africa in it's history and ideology regarding the Indigenous people of the continent. At the same time many people in Australia want to see change, and to see the crimes of history addressed. But many people in Australia also see the colonisation of the landmass as a 'civilising project'. The distance between these points is the reason why collective Australia is so often concerned with what it is to be 'Australian' and so much time, effort and money is spent in projecting out into the world a sort of composite image of 'Australia'. As recently as the 2023 FIFA women's world cup there were advertisements run to attract tourists to Australia which featured the same image that were being promoted in the 1980s (outback landscapes, marsupials, the beach and the Great Barrier Reef, the Opera House) in the tedious 'Come and Say G'day campaign'. If Australia as a culture could only articulate some of the complexities of the national story and history, I believe there could be massive change in how the society as a whole develops and many of the issues that are dividing the nation today would be incorporated into a larger understanding of national identity. One of the most difficult and important issues that needs to be incorporated into the nation is the ongoing history of genocide that is the story of Aboriginal survival. This film takes a bleak look at this horror

Naked Lunch (1991)

 

The adaption of the 1959 novel by William Burroughs by David Cronenberg. The film sits between the novel and Burroughs biography. It captures the sentiment of Burroughs' writing well, but it does not reproduce the dark, chaotic and humorous qualities of the novel. For the dedicated Burroughs fan or curious novice, the film should be accompanied by the novel (I have read it 5 times and did my MA thesis on it), along with Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan. Combined you will get a good image of not just an intense and intricate series of narratives, but a heightened literary experience concerning one of the greatest English language novels of the 20th century.

"The whole human position is no longer tenable," announces a character early in William S. Burroughs' Cities Of The Red Night. The story that Burroughs' biographer Ted Morgan - whose previous subjects include Winston S. Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Franklin D. Roosevelt - tells in Literary Outlaw is that of someone who has spent an entire literary life attempting to reconcile a belief that human existence is unendurable with the knowledge that it is also inescapable, and whose literary life itself derives from the event which confirmed him in that belief. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, William Seward Burroughs - alienated scion of the Midwestern upper-middle class, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, demimondain mentor to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, junkie, gun fetishist - was attempting to demonstrate the virtuosity of his marksmanship by doing a 'William Tell act', which involved shooting a glass balanced on the head of Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife and the mother of his five-year-old son, Willam Burroughs Jr. Burroughs père, being both drunk and stoned at the time, allowed his aim to slip, drilling Joan Burroughs through the forehead and killing her instantly. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion," Burroughs wrote almost three and a half decades later in the introduction to Queer (an autobiographical novel written in the early '50s but not published until 1985; and one of the most affecting tales of unrequited love in the English language), "that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death [which] maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."

In 1953, exterminator William Lee finds that his wife Joan is stealing his supply of insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating due to being exposed to the insecticide. Lee comes to believe that he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, assigns him the mission of killing Joan, who is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the beetle's instructions and kills it. Lee returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head to emulate William Tell.

Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, located in a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents, at the insistence of his visiting literary colleagues, are eventually compiled into the titular book. While Lee is addicted to assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, a doppelgänger of his dead wife. There is a row at gunpoint with Joan's husband Tom, after Lee steals his typewriter, which is then destroyed by the Clark Nova insect. Lee also encounters Yves Cloquet, who is apparently an attractive young gay Swiss gentleman. However, Lee later discovers that Yves is merely disguised as a human, and that his true form is a huge monstrous shapeshifting centipede.

After concluding that Dr. Benway is actually secretly masterminding a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" which is supposedly derived from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes, Lee encounters Tom's housekeeper Fadela, previously observed to be an agent of the narcotics operation. Fadela reveals herself as Dr. Benway in disguise. After being recruited as a double agent for the black meat operation, Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Stopped by the Annexian border patrol and instructed to prove that he is a writer as he claims, Lee produces a pen. When this proves insufficient for passage, Lee, now having realized that accidentally murdering his wife has driven him to become a writer, demonstrates his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan Frost's head. He again misses, and thus re-enacts the earlier killing of his wife. The border guards cheerfully bid him welcome to Annexia, and his new life as a writer. Lee is shown shedding a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.

Now, repeat after me: "Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had."

Romantic Warriors IV (A Progressive Music Saga): Krautrock

Romantic Warriors IV: Krautrock is a trilogy of feature-length documentaries about progressive music written and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder. RW4 focuses on the progressive rock music from Germany popularly known as Krautrock, although the integration of Krautrock into the progressive rock genre is a purely American notion. In Europe, the conventional wisdom is that Krautrock can be considered at most as the connection between psychedelic rock and progressive rock. The term "Krautrock" was applied after-the-fact by British journalists, and in fact the German bands share very few similarities.

Part 1 deals with bands from the Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg regions of Germany.

Part 2 focuses on bands from Munich, Wiesbaden, Ulm, and Heidelberg (including Guru Guru, Amon Düül II, Xhol Caravan, Embryo, Kraan, Popol Vuh, Witthüser & Westrupp).

Part 3 focuses on bands from Berlin and Hamburg (including Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Günter Schickert, Agitation Free, Conrad Schnitzler, A.R. & Machines, Nektar and some contemporary bands such as Robert Rich & Markus Reuter and Coolspring).

Gold Silver and Slaves: Britain and the Slave Trade

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is a 1968 American romantic comedy film directed by Hy Averback and starring Peter Sellers. The film is set in the counterculture of the 1960s. The cast includes Joyce Van Patten, David Arkin, Jo Van Fleet, Leigh Taylor-Young (in her film debut) and a cameo by the script's co-writer Paul Mazursky. The title refers to writer Alice B. Toklas, whose 1954 autobiographical cookbook had a recipe for cannabis brownies. The film's eponymous theme song was performed by sunshine pop group Harpers Bizarre.

Attorney Harold Fine is cornered into setting a date for marriage by his secretary/fiancée, Joyce. Because of a fender bender, he ends up driving a hippie vehicle, a psychedelically painted station wagon. When taking his hippie brother, Herbie, to the funeral of his family's butcher he encounters Nancy, Herbie's girlfriend, an attractive, free-spirited, barefoot flower power lady. She takes a liking to Harold, and after they spend a night together in his home, makes him pot brownies. However, she departs without telling him about its special ingredient, and not knowing what they are he eats them and feeds them to his father, mother, and fiancée, who dissolve in laughter and silliness. Harold considers the "trip" a revelation, and begins renouncing aspects of his "straight" life. He leaves his fiancée at the chuppah moments before they are to be married, starts living with Nancy, and tries to find himself with the aid of a guru. Ultimately he discovers the hippie lifestyle is as unfulfilling and unsatisfying as his old lifestyle—Nancy says that monogamy "isn't hip"—and once more decides to marry Joyce. At the last minute, he again leaves her at the altar and runs out of the wedding onto a city street saying he doesn't know for sure what he is looking for but, "there's got to be something beautiful out there."

Roger Ebert found some of the movie "good and pretty close to the mark, and Sellers is very funny," he disliked the film's stereotyped view of hippiedom, concluding, "If they'd dropped Sellers into a real hippie culture, we might really have had a movie here."

The Didgeridoo in Community

This video shows a group of non-indigenous enthusiast didgeridoo players visiting Wugularr Community, Northern Territory, Australia. They watch coroborree and make didgeridoos, whilst absorbing the culture and traditions from which the ancient instrument comes. Features David Blanasi and The White Cockatoo Performing Group - Aboriginal Culture / Didjeridu Tour 2001. Feat: David Blanasi, Tom Kelly. Darryl Dikarrna, Jack Nawalill, Norman, Frank.

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this film may contain images of deceased people"

Naga Baba Tradition Baba Rampuri

Baba Rampuri, an American expatriate, has lived in India since 1970, when be became the first foreigner to be initiated into India's most ancient order of yogis and shamans, the Naga Sannyasis. He is now a guru with a number of disciples within the order. During his long discipleship in this mystical and sometimes dangerous world, he received traditional teachings in sacred speech, mantra, tantra, ayurveda, logic, ritual, and, encompassing all the above, the way of the yogi in the Yoga Tradition. Baba says, "Your tool of knowledge is Speech, because its boundaries establish the possibilities of the world."

Reclaim the Streets - The Film

This is how we used to do it in the 90's...

Imagine 5000 people being taken across London by underground to a mystery location and then transforming a motorway into a sand pit, a dance floor, a forest. Imagine radical ecologists joining forces with sacked dockers and occupying Liverpool docks. Imagine Trafalgar Square metamorphosed into London's largest rave while under siege from 3000 unhappy riot police. Stop imagining and watc h this film. YOU WILL BE INSPIRED.

May 1995, London, England. A small group of people decide to organise an illegal street party in Camden, a part of the city renowned for its consumerism and incessant traffic. The final location is kept secret, because they know that the state and business will not be amused. Reclaim the Streets! is born, a cocktail of raging love, revolutionary carnival, art and anarchy. Since then the clandestine street parties have erupted all over the world. From Hull to Sydney, Lyon to Tel Aviv, Vancouver to Valencia, people are taking back their streets. And this is only the beginning.

This film, a 2012 re-edit of the original, made from over a hundred hours of footage from 13 film-makers, and brought up to date with a recent expose of cop infiltration, tells the story of reclaim the Streets from its origins in London to the Global Street Party in May 1998 when 30 cities simultaneously joined in the fun.

'Ultimately it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.'

Chumbawamba - Well Done, Now Sod Off!

 

A documentary about the band Chumbawamba, from their beginnings in an anarchist UK squat in the early 80s to their mainstream success and beyond.

Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog is a 1997 American political satire black comedy film produced and directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.

The film centers on a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. The screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet was loosely adapted from Larry Beinhart's 1993 novel, American Hero.

Wag the Dog was released one month before the outbreak of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality. The comparison was also made in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq during Clinton's impeachment trial over the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. It was made again in the spring of 1999 when the administration intervened in the Kosovo War and initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which coincidentally bordered Albania and contained ethnic Albanians.

The film grossed $64.3 million on a $15 million budget and was well received by critics, who praised the direction, performances, themes, and humor. Hoffman received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance and screenwriters David Mamet and Hilary Henkin were both nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.